• My Project - FASTA Analyser V1

    Getting back to the project I gave myself, here’s the first piece of code (not following tutorials) I had a go at writing. The aim here was to allow a user to enter a DNA sequence in text format, for example ‘CGATCGATCGAAATCGATGCCTAATCCATAGAGGGGA’ and to have Python return the length, G,...

  • My First Milestone

    Today, February 2nd 2018, I had my first ever Python script validated for use in my work environment! Let me explain… In my post ‘My First Project’ I mentioned that I wanted to give myself something to put my skills to the test. I talked about several modules or packages...

  • Python tips and tricks - literal vs raw strings

    When I began writing some basic code, I wanted to reference a particular directory. What I wrote looked a little something like this: The problem with this is that Python recognises “\” as an escape character. So to solve my issue I had to manually go through and change “\”...

  • My First Project

    Tutorials and video guides aside, I wanted to put what I’d learnt to the test in a real life application. I’ll give a little background to what I had in mind and why. I’ve mentioned before that I work with a lot of raw sequencing data. For those not into...

  • Learning the Basics

    So if you’re completely new to Python like me, how do you go about learning the basic concepts? Where do you even begin? Here’s the approach I took… I started off using the SoloLearn app on my phone and have progressed nicely though the Python course. I’d recommend this to...

  • Python 2.7 or 3.6?

    What’s the difference between Python 2.7 and 3.6? Which one should someone new to coding, like myself, use? These were really interesting questions that I didn’t know the answer to. So again I turned to the experts, the internet. Here’s what I found. The official Python pages are a great...

  • A Little Mention for Java

    Writing this blog retrospectively means I may have glossed over a teeny-weeny fact. Before I’d spoken to my colleagues and properly figured out what I wanted achieve with coding, I’d spent a couple of months learning to code with Java. I’m actually quite glad I went down the Java route...

  • Why Python?

    Approaching coding as a complete novice I quickly realised that I would need to research which language to learn. My initial thought was ‘Oh, I’ll just learn the one that’s most widely used’. Well, the upshot of that is that there are a handful of languages that are used widely,...